Windows Server® 2008 Security Resource Kit

Threats to Certificate Services and Mitigation Options

When you deploy Certificate Services, you need to consider a number of new threats that come along with them, including the following:

• Compromise of a CA's key pair

• Preventing revocation checking

• Attempts to modify the CA configuration

• Attempts to modify a certificate template

• Addition of nontrusted CAs to the trusted root CA store

• Enrollment Agents issuing unauthorized certificates

• Compromise of a CA by a single administrator

• Unauthorized recovery of a user's private key from the CA database

We will start this chapter by discussing each threat in detail and providing you with methods to mitigate these threats.

Compromise of a CA's Key Pair

Each CA in a CA hierarchy has a digital certificate that represents ...